Winton, Heritage and Sydney's Story
December 2023
Printed in: The Fifth Estate
Photo credit: Taras Vyshnya
Years after writing his classic novel, Cloudstreet (1991) – Tim Winton revisited one of its core themes – the importance of place. Included in later editions, Winton captured his thoughts in a post-script “afterword”. An opinion piece of sorts – he comments on Australia’s wrestle to realise the value of our built-environment heritage.
Set in post-war suburban Perth, Cloudstreet is partly autobiographical. It focuses on two families living together in a large house. Interestingly, the house itself is also a character in the story. Its walls absorb and observe the changing moods and fortunes of its inhabitants, whilst sometimes whispering of violent times now passed.
And as their stories emerge – this house, street and river close by – become intrinsic to who each character is. Remembering back over the writing process itself, Winton notes how difficult it was to even find the buildings key to his family’s story, just one generation earlier. Forced to recreate them in his mind, he is stunned at how quickly they’ve been destroyed.
“I went looking for the places sacred to my family and discovered many of them were gone. The buildings and ecosystems so central to the stories told by uncles and grandmothers and relatives of murky provenance at big gatherings or at quiet moments on the verandah seemed to only exist in memory. And I was shocked.
Perth was little more than a century old and yet the town my grandparents knew was not my hometown. Their city had already fallen to the robber barons and the wrecker’s ball. Even the places of my parents’ youth and courtship had been torn down and cemented over.
Had something handsome or interesting gone up in their stead, then I might have grudgingly acknowledged that things need to change, but invariably these grand ballrooms, riverbends, wetlands and Georgian houses were replaced by freeways and tower blocks of heartrending ugliness.”
These words are particularly pertinent to Sydney. A city immersed in a discussion about housing affordability. As a lust to find any land to redevelop takes hold, Sydney is also a city at a juncture – with crucial questions to be confronted. Namely: how important is our city’s story to us and therefore also its heritage?
In Cloudstreet, each character’s life experience is strongly influenced by place. Indeed, the house or area we grow up forms part of who we are ourselves. The civic centres of our forebears remind us where we’ve come from and instill a continuity in our communities. Yesterdays buildings are core to our city’s story, today. Yet, our hunger to tear these down reveals something deeper to Winton.
“In Perth there is always another mineral boom, or property bubble in the wings and the cycle of turnover, where the old must make way for the new, accelerates year upon year. Of all the houses I lived in as a boy in Perth, not one is still standing. Even my school was bowled over for a real-estate development.
For all its immense prosperity, this once distinctive city has devolved into a bland outpost of gimcrack knock-offs and inbuilt obsolescence. Everything is temporary, as if after two centuries of settlement we’re still camping out. What does it mean for a community to edit itself like this, to so spurn the past - or perhaps fear it - that the slate must be wiped clean for each new generation? What self-hatred does this betray?”
The world’s most popular global cities hero their built-environment stories. They add gravitas, character and support a city’s brand. However, are Sydneysiders even interested in having an endearing storyline to bolster our harbour’s beauty? Or, are we simply content to be something more mediocre, with the add on of pretty beaches?
Winton laments that:
“A Parisian can step into Victor Hugo’s house and an Athenian has antiquity looming on the hill at every turn, but in Western Australia there is nothing like this sort of connectedness. The built environment has no value. Every structure is ephemeral. So the haunts of my own parents would only be visited by an act of imagination. I had to sing them up for myself and make good the loss however I could.
It was exciting – and yes, consoling – to conjure up streets and houses that were no more, but sadly a fictional reimagining is just an echo. Like an extinct species or a lapsed dialect, a lost place is gone for good. I had to settle for the echo.”
As Sydneysiders, we are characters ourselves in our city. Heritage feeds story, story builds connection and connection is critical to a sense of home. A sense of home anchors us. By deleting earlier chapters, we dilute and weaken this bond. And for many, a Sydney without a story would become a city that once was – while other places will begin to tempt for what they can be.
